Blog # 8 - Final blog, and thoughts about Comm 324

Hard to believe that week 10 is already upon us all!

Our final blog post is to reflect upon the concepts and knowledge that we learned in Comm 324 this spring, while choosing a topic that directly interested us and going into a bit more depth about it.

While I found myself very interested in several topics brought up over the course of the term, conflict was one that interested me the most. Although I felt we didn't spend as much time on it as I would have liked to (seemingly due to time constraints), I still learned a lot from studying it in Comm 324, specifically learning to identify and address it from an academic point of view.

I feel that conflict in the workplace can be extremely unnerving, frustrating, and difficult to overcome. Over my working career since I was a freshman in high school (spanning 8 or 9 different jobs), I have been in several situations in just about every job I've had where I've had to deal with conflict - mostly with unruly coworkers or supervisors. In Comm 324, we learned that conflict can be a good or a bad thing, but it mostly depends on how the conflict is managed. I have definitely experienced both sides of conflict management - from the conflict being positive and directly generating creativity and new ways to solve problems, to the conflict being negative and not quite getting resolved, causing a more frustrating situation later down the road.

As an example, when I worked at a warehouse for a commercial paper company in Portland as a freshman in high school, I worked under a supervisor that constantly degraded my work ethic and made it a point to single out every minor and major mistake I would make. Something as simple as putting spiral notebooks into a box, and forgetting to put one piece of stock printer paper in between each spiral so that the spirals wouldn't mark each other. This guy would lay into me every single time I made any mistake. Let it be known this was my first official job I ever had and the guy knew it. Finally I had enough, and decided to take him aside and tell him personally that he was over-managing me. I told him that he acted like he was trying to be a hard-ass when it wasn't needed. I asked that he treat me with the same respect as he treated the regulars at the company, with whom he seemed to have good relationships with. He came to his senses, apologized, and we got along fine afterwards. After that moment in time I have never had a problem telling a supervisor that he/she is over-managing my work. It wasn't easy, and I was scared out of my mind when I did it. But I knew that if I hadn't done it, he would have continued to walk over me.

In class we learned that the best way to deal with conflict was to communicate in a clear way that makes sense, and make sure to cite specific feedback pertaining to the issue, addressing inappropriate behavior in valence, timeliness, specificity, frequency, and sensitivity. This reminds me back to my example above, where I felt as though I handled the situation fairly well for a 15 year old at his first job. I attempted to address my supervisor's behavior - like Dave Leding told us to in his guest lecture - but I also slightly attacked him as a person saying he was being a "hard-ass", probably not the best thing to do to someone who is your supervisor. At one point, you can get so frustrated that the situation seems beyond your control. That being said, it never hurts to take a step back and take a deep breath, and try to come at the situation again with a clear, level head.

As I see where I can relate the topic of conflict from organizational communication to my past, I know that work conflicts will certainly be in my future as well. Not by choice, obviously, but I think that working in organizations will always present the possibility of conflicts of interest and other unforeseeable problems. I felt that this class adequately taught us how to identify and deal with conflict to a degree, and I will certainly take this knowledge with me into my future career. I think that presenting us with mock conflicts and having us navigate our way through them might have been an effective way of teaching this topic as well, and I recommend it for the future.

And that's a wrap for this term in Comm 324. Thanks for reading!